Entrepreneurship, Second Edition

Chapter 2. THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS

Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg leaves his Palo Alto, CA office. (© News.com).

An entrepreneur is someone who perceives an opportunity and creates an organization to pursue it. The entrepreneurial process includes all the functions, activities, and actions that are part of perceiving opportunities and creating organizations to pursue them. But is the birth of a new enterprise just happenstance and its subsequent success or failure a chance process? Or can the art and science of entrepreneurship be taught? Clearly, professors and their students believe that it can be taught and learned because entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing new fields of study in American higher education. A study by the Kaufman Foundation in 2002 found that 61% of U.S. colleges and universities have at least one course in entrepreneurship. ^[] It is possible to study entrepreneurship in certificate, associate's, bachelor's, master's, and PhD programs.

That transformation in higher education—itself a wonderful example of entrepreneurial change—has come about because a whole body of knowledge about entrepreneurship has developed during the past two decades or so. The process of creating a new business is well understood. Yes, entrepreneurship can be taught. No one is guaranteed to become a Bill Gates or a Donna Karan, any more than a physics professor ...